In this excerpt from the collection of correspondence and ephemera Dear Mr. Beckett: Letters from the Publisher, Grove Press's infamous and revolutionary Barney Rosset describes the first time he met the future Nobel Prize-winning writer Samuel Beckett.

In this essay, award-winning author Roxana Robinson writes about the fascinating subject of her uncle, Dr. William Beecher Scoville, a neurosurgeon who inspired a character in her novel Cost. Scoville was also the subject of his grandson Luke Dittrich's recent nonfiction book, Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets. Robinson explores the concept of building character from reality for both fiction and nonfiction, and the hold that family has on our imagination. READ MORE

A Tribute to Edith Grossman

Honoring one of the most celebrated literary translators of our time on the occasion of her 80th birthday.

At the 2012 AWP conference, The Center for Fiction hosted a panel Literature and Evil with Ha Jin, Marilynne Robinson and Paul Harding, moderated by Noreen Tomassi. Here, the author of Nanjing Requiem elucidates his views on the danger of seeing evil as "other".

We asked Kate Bernheimer—author of a trilogy of brilliantly subversive tales, fairy-tale anthologist and champion-in-chief of the numinous world of Once Upon a Time, and founder and editor of Fairy Tale Review, why fairy tales deserve more respect. She answered—and then gathered celebrated writers Kevin Brockmeier, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Timothy Schaffert, and Maria Tatar to tell us more. READ MORE

"Jonathan Franzen (in his essay in The New Yorker, “A Critic at Large”) addresses “the problem of sympathy” for Edith Wharton. It’s a serious matter, by his account: He finds Wharton hard to like. His reasons are personal and class-related: He castigates Wharton for her privileged family, her looks, her too few women friends, her too many famous male friends, her money, her sexual ignorance, her charmlessness, and her methods of travel."

"Doris Betts died Saturday, April 21, 2012 at Araby Farm in Pittsboro, North Carolina. Yes, the farm was named for the James Joyce story, and not coincidentally for the up to 17 Arabian horses it kept, a passion of her husband, Judge Lowry Betts. She was author of six novels and three collections of short stories, and won many awards for her writing...."

"When I first read Robert Stone’s work I was struck by the beauty of the sentences. That’s the way a writer reads, listening to cadence and rhythm and beauty, and that’s what first draws your respect and attention. Also the perfect economy of his prose: 'Father Egan left off writing, rose from his chair and made his way – a little unsteadily – to the bottle of Flor de Cana which he had placed across the room from his desk.'(From A Flag for Sunrise)."

The baby, who is four days old, is his son, and there is a moment as he is falling that this house he has come home to seems like the most peaceful place in the world. Outside is the cold dead of 3:00 a.m. on a late- November night in Kansas, but inside is lamplight, the warm smell of a newborn, and Adam’s wife, Saskia, beautiful Saskia, who a few minutes before had asked her husband if he could watch the baby so she could get a little sleep."

"It was late autumn when Charlie Parker sidled up to one of the guys standing outside the 65 Club, on Fifty-Fifth Street at Michigan Avenue, and no one thought he might be dreaming about music. They gave him a look that was short on contempt but long on experience. These were night people, men in possession of the electricity, the anarchy, the pride, the suspicion, and the doubt of the times. They knew how it went. Whatever it was, they saw it coming."

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